Like its title character, Teenage Dick is sneaky. What begins as a gleeful, knowing reboot of Richard III in an all-American high school, gradually skews darker. Richard, a disabled 17-year-old, connives against the school jock to become senior-year president – but like his Shakespearean predecessor his rise is also a fall.
Many of us are shadowed by our unhappy teenaged selves. American playwright Mike Lew hoped to “channel the frustrations of being that age. It’s a really vulnerable age, and where you put those insecurities was interesting to me. That age is so traumatising, it’s very easy to fall back.”
Daniel Monks, taking the title role in the British premiere, also carries his adolescent self with him. Despite becoming head boy of his Australian high school (not, he clarifies, by Richard’s “nefarious means”), he found growing up difficult. “I struggled with being a disabled teenager and a gay teenager and a gay, disabled teenager. Experiencing so much shame for anything that makes you perceived as different – I totally identify with a lot of the friction and pain in the play. Being a teenager just sucks.”
I sit in on a rehearsal at London’s Donmar Warehouse where the cast and director Michael Longhurst dig into the characters. It’s like a hilarious gossip session about everyone’s imaginary friends. Lew, at one end of the table, keeps his counsel – arms crossed, eyes down. Monks, in contrast, is disarmingly jolly as he reads – a wide, guileless smile above a bright red T-shirt. You realise how underrated Richard might dodge everyone’s defences.
After hearing Monks in a reading of the play (“I fortunately didn’t realise it was a low-key audition”), Lew has been more than willing to tailor the role. “Daniel was like, ‘You’ve written this character with cerebral palsy, and I can play that – but I have hemiplegia.’ I embraced that, because I’ll always see what actors are giving me and try to make it bespoke.”
The text includes a non-negotiable casting note – Richard and his friend Buck must be played by disabled actors. “Teenage Dick is meant to be a little bit of a poison pill, in that it seems so digestible,” Lew explains, “but in order to produce it successfully, you have to rethink how you go about your daily business.” Or, as Monks puts it, “you can’t get the disabled narrative for free. You need to employ disabled actors to get it.”
Of course Richard III, with his oft-exaggerated hunchback and murderous instinct, is hardly a poster boy for disability. “We’ve been talking about this a lot,” Monks says, “how, historically, disabled people were seen as marked by the devil. The reaction to that was that they’re objects of pity – saintly or vulnerable. You very rarely have a chance to play a complex human being. It’s a joy for an actor, exploring what it is to be a disabled person in a society that isn’t made for you.” With more than one disabled character in the play, Monks doesn’t need to represent what he calls “an ambassador for the community. I want to make messy, complicated, fucked-up art.”
As a prominent Chinese-American playwright, does Lew embrace an ambassadorial role? “No,” he says. Nonetheless, he is mindful of representation. “A lot of the conversations I had with my friend Gregg Mozgala, who commissioned the play [it premiered off-Broadway in 2018], came out of the parallels between our roles in our communities.” He hopes writers from perceived minorities will “overwhelm the market with a volume of different takes, so that no one piece has that burden, of containing the entirety of an experience”.
Lew and his wife, Rehana Mirza, are joint writers-in-residence at California’s La Jolla Playhouse, and are currently collaborating on something even more ambitious – a trilogy about British colonialism. “A lot of American theatre is very ahistorical,” he explains. Alongside this mighty project, he’s also tackling wrenchingly personal material: their baby daughter’s time in a neonatal intensive care unit after her premature birth earlier this year. Details of the experience are already receding, he says: “Your brain is protecting you.”
Monks was an acting-obsessed kid (“insufferable, attention-seeking, living for the applause,” he says cheerfully) before a botched operation at age 11 left him paralysed on his right side. Playing the lead in his debut film Pulse renewed his passion for performance. He is happy to parse his identity. “I feel like having a lived experience of two minorities helps me critique the two communities. For example, the gay male community is over-sexualised and the disabled community is desexualised, so living between those is really strange. I’ve experienced more ableism in the gay male community than anywhere, even the mainstream, whereas the disabled community is much more inclusive, because it really knows what it is like to be excluded.” Now based in London, he says he’s a “better, richer actor” because of the experiences he’s gone through: “Instead of acting for attention I’m acting because I have stories to tell.”
• Teenage Dick is at the Donmar Warehouse, London, 6 December–1 February.
